Thirty-one years after its launch, and 12 years after its most-recent servicing mission, the NASA/ European Space Agency (ESA) Hubble Space Telescope remains in safe mode on orbit as operators work to determine why the iconic observatory ceased science operations at 02:38 EDT on October 25.
The latest safe mode event continues to publicly show the telescope’s age as its systems gradually deteriorate without servicing — all while NASA, ESA, and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) prepare for the December launch of a successor to Hubble in the James Webb Space Telescope.